Born in Breslau, Germany, Frank Marcus saw and felt the repercussions of Hitler's rise and the spread of fascism throughout Europe. As an impressionable young Jew growing up in a repressive and menacing environment, he, in fact, confronted the same grim realities that inform the painting of George Grosz and the drama of Bertolt Brecht, although the grim comedy that Marcus evidences in his best plays is always suffused by a genuine compassion for the creatures of his imagination who are never made fun of and are rarely sacrificed to thesis. Even the dictatorial protagonist of The Killing of Sister George (1965), June Buckridge, paradoxically reveals her humanity to the audience by the play's end in her plaintive "Moo."

Marcus, the son of Frederick J. and Gertie Marcus, emigrated with his family to England in 1939, and he entered Bunce Court School, Kent, where he remained until 1943. He then attended...